Can I Recover my Files?

[samcec]

RoboHelp X5 Office; Windows XP SP3 Professional

I accidentally deleted my Topic files. When I bring up my Topic list, all of my Topics have a red "x" on the icon. I checked the Recycle bin. They are not there. I did a search of my "C" drive; couldn't find them.

Am I screwed?????
Sam

[RoboWizard]

Hi Sam

No backup? If not, you may not be totally screwed. If you have a .CHM or WebHelp output, you should be able to recover. .CHM is easier. See if the following link helps.

Click here

Cheers... Rick

[samcec]

I'm screwed. I even used an "undelete" routine, searched for deleted files on my "C" drive. I couldn't come up with them. For example: one of by topic files was called "Action_screen.htm". After getting a list of deleted files, I did a search on this htm. Files found = 0

Sam

[Peter Grainge]

As Rick suggested, can you not get an output from somewhere? A PC that has had your software installed along with the help you created?

It is possible to recreate the help from there following the link Rick gave you.

[samcec]

Thanks for the help. Nothing seems to be recoverable. The bad part about all this is: on Friday night's I do an automatic backup of my system. I did all this work within the last couple of days and this happened Friday afternoon, before the backup.

My wife and I are going away for 2 weeks. If you respond to this post, I may not, depending on the time, be able to get back to you.

Bon Voyage,
Sam

[samcec]

A quick note before my question: The 2 week cruise was "just what the doctor ordered". It was great.

Now back to learning:

This morning I created a "Test Topic" then deleted it. It was removed from my topic list and then put into the Recycle Bin. I could restore it.

I don't know what I did before but all of my topics had a red "X" over the icon. They were NOT put into the Recycle bin. I highlighted one of them, deleted it and then checked the Recycle Bin again. It was not there.

Can anyone explain what is happening to them and what would cause that red "X"?

Thanks,
Sam

[Peter Grainge]

You cannot restore a topic from the Recycle bin. You can restore it to the right folder in Windows Explorer but that does not put it back in the project database.

It sounds like the whole problem is that you are doing things outside RH.

[samcec]

Pete:

I realize I am learning RoboHelp but I believe I am creating everything within RoboHelp. To create a new Topic, I right-clicked in the Topic window and clicked "New-Topic". Then did my typing.

Another question: Is it better to do the typing using MS Office Word 2003 (on my system), save it them Import the document to Robohelp?

Sam

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Your problem seems not to be creating the topics but what happens when you delete them and then want to restore them.

You said you had deleted a topic and then restored it from the Recycle bin. If you create and delete, it is gone from the project and so are the images. Restoring it from the Recycle bin does not get it back in the project, just into Windows, then you have to import into RH to get it back. Unlike the topic, the images do not get deleted so once you restore the topic from the recycle bin and import it, it should all come back.

By all means create a document in Word and import it into RH HTML provided you really want more problems than you already have. It will give you poor HTML code and other problems. Don't go there.